A (Very, Very) Short History of Minimalism: From The Chronicler to the Present

By Jim West
Quartz Hill School of Theology
September 2010

“Minimalism”1
is the supposition that the biblical text cannot rightly or honestly
be mined for historical reconstructions of ancient Israel or earliest
Christianity. The underlying assumption here is that the biblical
text is not historically oriented. That is to say, the purpose of
the Bible is not to offer 21st
century historians fodder for their reconstructive mills; it is to
speak theologically to ancient (and I would also say, modern)
communities of faith.

Though
this definition isn’t necessarily the standard definition of
minimalism, it does offer a more accurate understanding of what
“minimalism” is and will be the working definition for
the words “minimalism’ and ‘minimalist’ in
what follows. Furthermore, denoting ancient persons as “minimalists”
is admittedly anachronistic. Nonetheless, I’ll use it anyway
simply because it encapsulates present reality. So, for example,
Paul the Apostle may not have gone to Copenhagen or Sheffield to
learn theology- but I describe him as a ‘minimalist” for
reasons I shall demonstrate below, albeit briefly.

First,
though, a few things have to be stated as clearly as possible:

1 -
Most “histories” of Ancient Israel and Earliest
Christianity are simply examples of circular reasoning. Many
historians use the Bible as a historical source; they reconstruct a
history which is often nothing more than a recapitulation of the
biblical telling; and the Bible is affirmed as historical because of
the history so constructed. Similarly, the life of Jesus, for
instance, is gleaned from a reading of the Gospels. Said
reconstruction is named a ‘history of Jesus’ life.”
That “history of Jesus’ life” is then utilized to
prove historically the life of Jesus as described in the Gospels.
One need only pick up John Bright’s “History of Israel”2
or Joseph Ratzinger’s “Jesus”3
to see circularity in action. True, ancillary materials are added to
these histories (on the very rare occasions that they are available)-
but these only reinforce the circularly circumscribed reconstruction.

2 -
Any attempt to construct a history of Israel or earliest Christianity
without appealing to the Bible is doomed to fail. Even the heartiest
efforts4
to offer a history of ancient Israel or the early Church usually draw
on the biblical text. It is inevitable.

3 -
Do points one and two imply, as some souls would have us believe5,
that there really was no historical Jesus or ancient Israel? μὴγένοιτο!
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence; absence of evidence
is evidence of absolutely nothing at all. What points one and two
illustrate is that the Bible as Bible cannot be used for grandiose
historical projects: nothing more, and nothing less. Something
happened. We just aren’t in a position to say what. Not
historically.

That
said, we can now move on to assert that the Bible itself is the first
and foremost witness to the propriety of minimalism as an approach.
Think, for example of what the Chronicler does to the story of
David’s numbering of Israel. 2 Sam 24 clearly states that
Yahweh impelled David to number the nation. The Chronicler,
completely disinterested in the “historical” situation,
alters the tale completely and instead of describing Yahweh as
inciting David to count the folk, he describes Satan doing it (1 Chr
21). These two accounts can’t be harmonized historically, and
the Chronicler surely understood that. The historicity of that
tradition did not matter to the Chronicler because he approached the
text as a minimalist: it wasn’t “history” that
mattered, but ‘theology.” In this regard, most
redactional emendation can be seen as an adoption of miminalist
literary technique, be it inner-biblical exegesis, midrashic
interpretation, or targumic reconciliation – all of these are
examples of minimalist attempts to rewrite or properly explain
history.

In
fact, a cursory examination of the Chronicler’s work
demonstrates that he is not at all interested in “history”
in the same way that modern historians of the Bible seem to be.
Rather, he was first, foremost, and only, a theologian.6

But
the Chronicler wasn’t the only biblical author who didn’t
care about “historicity.” The synoptic Gospels, too, each
go their own way. Matthew recounts a Sermon on the Mount while Luke
has a Sermon on the Plain. Neither cared where the sermon (or
sermons) occurred; they only concerned themselves with the
theological substance of the sayings of Jesus – sayings they
compiled and organized along lines purely determined by theological
necessity rather than historical accuracy. In fact, even though Luke
appears to be casting his Gospel in “historical” garb, he
only adopts that appearance in order to make his story of Jesus sound
very much like the Septuagint’s story of God’s acts on
behalf of his people. That is, Luke is writing in a style
intentionally mimicking the Old Testament so as to make clear to his
readers that the story of Jesus is just the continuation of the
activity of God among his own. If Luke were writing “history,”
he got a number of things mucked up (as all commentators and
historians recognize- e.g., the census he mentions at the beginning
of his Gospel). But Luke doesn’t care about such things
because he’s doing theology, not historiography.

The
Gospel of John, similarly, does theology without any interest in
portraying “things as they actually were.” John places,
for example, the cleansing of the Temple right at the start of Jesus’
ministry while the Synoptics place it right at the end.
Unfortunately, New Testament scholars have needlessly debated which
one was “right” in their chronology7.
Both and neither one is right because both are interested in saying
something theological and neither cares about the historicity of the
cleansing.

Paul
too shows absolutely no interest in “historical” matters.
See 2 Cor 5:16 where he, for all intents and purposes, dismisses
any “quest” for the historical Jesus.8
In fact, the letters of Paul contain scant “historical”
reference. “Born of a woman, born under the law”
(Galatians 4:4) is about as historical as Paul gets when it comes to
discussing the life of Jesus. Likewise, “I am crucified with
Christ….” barely touches the fringe of the historicist
garment. Paul is just not interested in the historical details of
his faith’s earliest comings and goings. Rather, again, Paul’s
concern is theological.

In
the Deutero-Paulines and the Catholic epistles, there is no
“historical reconstruction” implied or indicated in any
of them. Revelation too is metaphysical and super-historical (and
maybe even too metaphysical!).

In
sum, the Bible, from beginning to end, is primarily interested in
God. The stage is set in the opening verse of Genesis where we
learn, “In the beginning, God….” The Bible’s
aim is not to tell a historical tale; its aim is to tell a
theological tale. For that reason its authors, minimalists all,
recognized that their work and aim and calling was something other
than to use traditions and tales for historical reconstruction.
“What, when, and how” were of no interest to them at all;
but “why and who” mattered supremely.

Time
would fail us to consider Augustine and Jerome, Origen and Cyril,
Clement and Aquinas, Luther and Zwingli and Calvin… men of
whom the world was not worthy. They wandered in deserts and lived in
caves (and in Luther’s case, taverns); they were scorned,
mocked, beaten, and abused, and yet they never sought refuge in a
false historicism. They and other exegetes up until quite recently
(the 18th
century essentially) understood that theology is the substance of
things biblical and the evidence of things free from needing
historical underpinning. The tyranny of the circularly arrived-at
Sitz
im Leben
had no power over them.

Postmodern
interpreters and post-postmoderners who use the Bible to ask and
answer the questions about “what, when, and how” are
asking the wrong questions altogether. If they were to ask the Bible
“why and who,” they would at least be getting closer to
the truth. As it is, that truth is obscured from them since we all
know (or should know) that the answers we get are utterly dependent
on the questions we ask.

Minimalism
did not begin with Lemche9
or Thompson10
or Whitelam11
or Davies12
or any of the other central or marginal players commonly associated
with it: it began with the Chronicler and the Prophets and the
Evangelists and the Psalmists and Paul and John and was continued by
the Fathers of the Church and their Reforming heirs. Minimalism is
not a new phenomenon; it is as old as Scripture itself.

For
this reason we can only rationally conclude that maximalists, then,
are the true distorters of Scripture. They are perverters of the
meaning, purpose, and intent of sacred writ as evidenced by their
rejection of the methodological approach of the very authors of
Scripture themselves.

7
See the very interesting debate currently taking place in the
Society of Biblical Literature and spearheaded by the John, Jesus
and History group, http://catholic-resources.org/SBL/JJH.html,
accessed 30 August,2010. And while skeptical of their results
(because historio-centric), I’m very glad to see John getting
some positive press after all these decades of disdain.